Fantasia Festival: “Terrestrial" Asks if the Real Horror is Ourselves
With a title like Terrestrial, the viewer is primed for some kind of alien activity. As such, you might not expect Steve Pink, the director of Hot Tub Time Machine, to be the one to tell this story. Any reservations will almost certainly evaporate in Terrestrial’s opening scene. What starts as a group of college friends coming together to celebrate success quickly grows into a film whose scope is wide-reaching. Much like the science-fiction stories Terrestrial is celebrating, beneath the promise of aliens is a social commentary about what people are willing to lose in order to gain their dreams.
Maddie (Pauline Chalamet), Ryan (James Morosini), and Vic (Edy Modica) are driving to visit their college friend Allen (Jermaine Fowler) at the behest of his mother. She’s concerned that he might be spiraling out of control because he hasn’t been answering any of her calls. Allen agrees to see his old college friends, and they’re surprised that the address he’s sent is one of a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. They were expecting to find him in a dark emotional place, but instead, everything seems to be coming up Allen. He’s got a book deal and a movie deal before the novel’s even written, but the friends can tell something’s a little fishy with Allen’s new digs.
courtesy of Fantasia Film Festival
A focal point of Allen’s new mansion is the entire room dedicated to The Neptune Cycle. Based on books by Allen’s favorite author, S.J. Purcell (Brendan Hunt), The Neptune Cycle was a series of Star Trek-esque science fiction films that were made in the ’90s. Allen sees Purcell and The Neptune Cycle as his North Star. He dreams of being a science-fiction author, but finds himself working at a diner, scribbling on scraps of paper between orders. A surprisingly large part of Terrestrials is about the artist’s grind. The fight to make the impossible dream a reality. While it’s not explicitly stated in the movie, one can guess that Allen left whatever small town he grew up in to move to LA for a chance at the thing he wants most in the world. And what happens when he can feel that chance slipping through his fingers? What then?
Somewhere around the thirty-minute mark, Terrestrial upends itself. Everything the audience thought they were figuring out is suddenly ripped away to begin the real story of the film. Revealing the true plot would ruin the wild ride of the last two-thirds of the movie, but the sleight-of-hand Terrestrial pulls cannot be overstated. It’s Fowler’s performance as Allen that plays a huge part in making this high-wire act work. The shift that takes place could have led the film careening off the edge of the Hollywood Hills, but Fowler and the screenplay (by Samuel Johnson and Connor Diedrich) keep the wheels on the road. What emerges from the tonal shift is a movie far beyond its promises of sci-fi and aliens.
Terrestrial spans a multitude of genres, some of which would be spoilers, but comedy is its secret weapon. A dry joke here, an out-of-the-blue physical joke there, coming together to make a dark comedy about the pursuit of a dream becoming all-consuming. Terrestrial is as mind-bending as it is grounded, a testament to the insanity that comes from chasing your dreams.
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